Search form

Main menu

Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.

Find the perfect audience for your poems, stories, essays, and reviews by researching over one thousand literary magazines. In the Literary Magazines database you’ll find editorial policies, submission guidelines, contact information—everything you need to know before submitting your work to the publications that share your vision for your work.

Whether you’re pursuing the publication of your first book or your fifth, use the Small Presses database to research potential publishers, including submission guidelines, tips from the editors, contact information, and more.

Research more than one hundred agents who represent poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers, plus details about the kinds of books they’re interested in representing, their clients, and the best way to contact them.

Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.

Poets & Writers lists readings, workshops, and other literary events held in cities across the country. Whether you are an author on book tour or the curator of a reading series, the Literary Events Calendar can help you find your audience.

Research newspapers, magazines, websites, and other publications that consistently publish book reviews using the Review Outlets database, which includes information about publishing schedules, submission guidelines, fees, and more.

Well over ten thousand poets and writers maintain listings in this essential resource for writers interested in connecting with their peers, as well as editors, agents, and reading series coordinators looking for authors. Apply today to join the growing community of writers who stay in touch and informed using the Directory of Writers.

Download our free app to find readings and author events near you; explore indie bookstores, libraries, and other places of interest to writers; and connect with the literary community in your city or town.

Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.

Well over ten thousand poets and writers maintain listings in this essential resource for writers interested in connecting with their peers, as well as editors, agents, and reading series coordinators looking for authors. Apply today to join the growing community of writers who stay in touch and informed using the Directory of Writers.

Find information about more than two hundred full- and low-residency programs in creative writing in our MFA Programs database, which includes details about deadlines, funding, class size, core faculty, and more. Also included is information about more than fifty MA and PhD programs.

Whether you are looking to meet up with fellow writers, agents, and editors, or trying to find the perfect environment to fuel your writing practice, the Conferences & Residencies is the essential resource for information about well over three hundred writing conferences, writers residencies, and literary festivals around the world.

Poets & Writers lists readings, workshops, and other literary events held in cities across the country. Whether you are an author on book tour or the curator of a reading series, the Literary Events Calendar can help you find your audience.

Discover historical sites, independent bookstores, literary archives, writing centers, and writers spaces in cities across the country using the Literary Places database—the best starting point for any literary journey, whether it’s for research or inspiration.

Take a guided tour of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, and many other cities. We asked authors, booksellers, publishers, editors, and others to share the places they go to connect with writers of the past, to the bars and cafés where today’s authors give readings, and to those sites that are most inspiring for writing.

Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.

Hear from the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine as they offer a behind-the-scenes preview of the new issue, talk with contributors and authors featured in the magazine, and discuss the lighter side of writing, publishing, and the literary arts in this decidedly DIY podcast.

The Time Is Now offers weekly writing prompts in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. Sign up to get The Time Is Now, as well as a weekly book recommendation for guidance and inspiration, delivered to your inbox.

Ads in Poets & Writers Magazine and on pw.org are the best ways to reach a readership of serious poets and literary prose writers. Our audience trusts our editorial content and looks to it, and to relevant advertising, for information and guidance.

Poets & Writers Live is an initiative developed in response to interviews and discussions with writers from all over the country. When we asked what Poets & Writers could do to support their writing practice, time and again writers expressed a desire for a more tangible connection to other writers. So, we came up with a living, breathing version of what Poets & Writers already offers: Poets & Writers Live.

Each year the Readings & Workshops program provides support to hundreds of writers participating in literary readings and conducting writing workshops. Learn more about this program, our special events, projects, and supporters, and how to contact us.

Organizations based in California, New York State, as well as in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Seattle, New Orleans, Tucson, and Washington D.C., are welcome to apply for support from the Readings & Workshops program for their literary events.

Presenters and writers who need to submit a report after a P&W-supported event can get started here. Reports help us demonstrate the value of the Readings & Workshops program to funders and help us continue to offer support to writers and organizations hosting literary events.

Digital Digest: The “Single-Sitting” Revolution

Not long ago it was common knowledge that innovations in digital media were killing serious reading. Attention spans were contracting, or so the narrative went, and content providers were sacrificing text for eye candy. But over the last few years that mind-set has started to shift—a change stimulated, ironically, by the success of portable reading devices. The emergence of publishing platforms designed to rescue digital reading from the constraints and distractions of the web browser is not only fostering the kind of immersive experience required for deep reading, but it’s also making viable a new form of writing: works such as long essays, single stories, and short novellas capable of being read in a single sitting that, in the print world, would be lost in the no-man’s-land between magazine article and book.

Not surprisingly, the most prominent player in the field is Amazon, which in January 2011 launched the Kindle Singles program, billed as an outlet for “ideas expressed at their natural length.” About two hundred previously unpublished titles, ranging from five thousand to thirty thousand words in length, are currently listed at prices between $0.99 and $4.99. And the format has taken off: By March of this year Singles had already racked up more than two million downloads, according to Laura Hazard Owen of the technology website GigaOM.

Overseen by former Village Voice editor in chief David Blum, the Kindle Singles program releases an average of three original titles each week, drawing on a submission pool that is fed both by unsolicited manuscripts and material pitched by authors, agents, and publishers. Amazon also commissions works from established writers, thus the current Singles best-seller list includes titles by genre giants (Nelson DeMille and Jodi Picoult) alongside works by literary authors (poet and translator Jane Hirshfield’s The Heart of Haiku), relative unknowns (Brian Haigh’s spoof on the self-help genre, Awaken Your Perfect Self), and even comeback stories (Frank Gilroy, who won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play The Subject Was Roses in 1965, has two new titles—a novella and a memoir—charting). Accepted works are released under the terms of the Kindle Direct Publishing program, which offer rights holders a 70 percent royalty.

Similar forums intended to showcase single-sitting works have already been set up by Amazon’s chief competitors. The Quick Reads section of Apple’s iTunes store and the Snaps market for the Barnes & Noble NOOK (which, with funding from Microsoft, was spun off this past spring into a subsidiary company) match Amazon’s price points for titles the three retailers offer in common. But unlike Amazon, which restricts Kindle Singles to previously unpublished material and places certain limits on genre (no children’s books, travel guides, or how-to manuals are considered), neither Apple nor NOOK is directly soliciting original content.

Titles for all three major platforms—iPad, Kindle, and NOOK—are being supplied by a handful of new publishing ventures dedicated to the single-sitting format. San Francisco–based Byliner (byliner.com), which went live a year ago, offers both Byliner Originals (primarily stories by established writers, although the site does accept queries via e-mail) as well as a curated archive of new and classic nonfiction works. The company has grabbed more spots on the Kindle Singles best-seller list than any of its peers, and boasts Margaret Atwood, Jon Krakauer, and Amy Tan among its authors. Byliner pays its authors an initial flat fee, and then shares any profits fifty-fifty.

Where Byliner prefers to stick with unadorned text, the Atavist (atavist.net), a New York City–based boutique publisher, produces original nonfiction works that include multimedia enhancements, social connectivity, and even the potential to change over time in response to new data or reader feedback. Dubbed “inline content,” the extra features are accessible through the company’s Apple app, where essays and articles retail for $2.99. Kindle and NOOK editions, which contain only text and images, sell for a dollar less. The Atavist compensates its contributors according to a revenue-sharing model similar to Byliner’s, but so far it remains closed to unsolicited submissions.

Providers of original single-sitting content join a multitude of media innovators—such as Longform (longform.org, named for the type of in-depth essay and reportage that often defies the cramped confines of digital venues), Longreads (longreads.com), and ReadItLater’s new incarnation, Pocket (getpocket.com)—that are already working to curate and stylishly pre-sent digital literature in the service of engaged reading. And the phenomenon seems to be gaining momentum, along with some seriously broad backing. When the founders of MATTER (readmatter.com)—a nascent journalism platform that intends to publish a single 99¢ piece each week—appealed to the crowdfunding site Kickstarter for support, they hit their $50,000 goal in only three days. Overall, the campaign raised over $140,000 from more than twenty-five hundred individual donors. Mass responses like this should go some way toward palliating the worry that consumers have been conditioned to expect digital content for nothing. The success of new publishing formats indicates not just a demand for quality writing on accessible e-platforms, but a willingness on the part of readers to pay for it.

Adrian Versteegh is a journalist and a MacCracken Fellow at New York University. His nonacademic writing has appeared recently in Dissent and Brooklyn Rail.